


seasonal; affected

by zechariahfour (sodas)



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Series, set in Japan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 03:39:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16824355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sodas/pseuds/zechariahfour
Summary: It’s like the wind in the wheat. It’s like the seasons. Eiji puts his hand into Ash’s hair, and it’s like the best part of every season and none of the worst. “Please don’t do it again,” he says. It’s like the wind in the wheat—his touch is—and Ash understands how his body can overcome the air to fly. “Please, please don’t again.” He moves his thumb along Ash’s hairline, and tucks some hair behind his ear.“Sorry,” Ash says.





	seasonal; affected

**Author's Note:**

> if you care for backing music here, [try this.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWMal6nD-Ko)

He heard murmurs through the night. All night, he heard their murmurs, and at times their weeping too. They didn’t raise their voices at any point. None of them did that. Eiji made a little more sense once Ash listened to their murmurs, and their weeping, and the sighs and the creaking as they moved from their seats close to morning. Ash held his breath when the sounds of them grew closer, and he thought about how stupid it was to do that. None of them would enter. If they did, nothing horrific would happen. And he still sat bunched up on the futon, and he still watched the line of his tense toes. Eiji laughed softly, close to the guest bedroom, and Eiji’s mother said something so quiet and bleakly kind—Ash imagined she was telling Eiji not to wake him. Eiji hummed reluctantly, indulgently, and Ash imagined Eiji knew he was still awake. Eiji parted from his parents while they murmured more—their goodnights—and all their footsteps got further and further away. It was quiet. It was quiet. Ash let out his breath. He watched the line of his toes. He thought, ‘I am going to feel this way forever.’

\--

And he’s thinking that, and he’s thinking of it, when he leaves on the fifth day. It isn’t at dawn, it isn’t before the residence has risen for the day—he had breakfast with them, in fact. Eiji’s mother clucked and sighed and chirped happily around the kitchen after Ash tried his best to say ‘gochisousama’ to her. Ash watched her with a quiet smile, calm like the waving of sea grass, in the slow and gentle hold of water and sunlight. And Eiji watched him, and Eiji’s mouth was hushed and vaguely held, and Eiji should have known better. He probably did know better, but it would have been so stupid for Ash to do that it was perhaps easy to dismiss. And Ash isn’t thinking about any of it when he leaves—not the vague shape of Eiji’s mouth, nor the hen-like warmth of Mrs. Okumura, nor the breakfast, the father who read the newspaper in his crisp shirt and tie, the little sister who pressed a good luck charm into Eiji’s pocket when he went to America. Ash is thinking only of his first night in Japan: Eiji’s sister crying when she was sent to bed, and Eiji’s parents never raising their voices through the night. He supposes they held Eiji for hours. Well, they ought to. And above all he is thinking, ‘I am going to feel this way forever.’ The footsteps past his door, and his own feet, tense. The tendons in his arms, tight. The catch of his breath, and the freight train in his brain. These will be with him forever, and he understands this with a mild something, smooth-faced, that he tells himself is clarity. So he slips out after breakfast, after the sister is gone for school, after the father has gone for work. Eiji has given Ash an English novel to spend time with, and is peeling vegetables with his mother in the kitchen. They’re laughing when Ash gets up and leaves through the front door. They both have such nice laughs. 

Ash comes back around 6 in the evening. He can hear the voices inside before he hits the doorbell. They’re speaking loudly. Eiji is speaking loudly. Ash hasn’t heard this come out of him since well before they came to Japan—there’s this peak to him, there’s this pressure. Ash opens his mouth while he listens. He can’t decipher any syllables and he couldn’t understand the words if he heard them anyway, but hearing Eiji’s peak and pressure takes Ash back to lying in a hospital bed, recently stabbed, confused by his own survival. His mouth is open. He thinks, bewildered, ‘The neighbors will hear.’ They probably won’t, though. He rings the doorbell. He listens to everyone go quiet. Then it’s loud again, and he knows it will be Eiji who opens the door—and it is—and Eiji looks like he’s been flying. He looks freshly drawn from one of Ibe’s photos, with the sweat and the overflow of life, the dark eyes a sterner and brighter burn than a solar eclipse. He has flung open the door, and he gasps. “Where were you,” he says. 

“In the city,” says Ash. 

“You left,” Eiji says. 

“I was in the city,” says Ash. 

Mrs. Okumura is herding Eiji’s sister further into the house. Ash looks past Eiji to watch it, and then looks back to Eiji, aware that whatever scene this is, he’s caused it. He watches Eiji’s face, and then he raises his eyebrows. He wonders whether Eiji is going to—just two hands flat against Ash’s chest, one push—but Eiji grinds his teeth, works his jaw, and then steps aside. 

Mrs. Okumura dabs at her eyes with the heels of her palms when she sees Ash. Mr. Okumura clears his throat and nods strongly. He doesn’t quite know what to do with himself or his wife or his children, and hasn’t since Ash came into his home. Eiji’s sister yells something from upstairs. Then she yells, “Aaaash!” Ash opens his mouth, but Eiji says something first, quick and heavy, his voice bearing down on a chopping block. Ash thinks he’s telling her to shut up. She does. Everyone does. Then Mrs. Okumura jumps, cries out the word Ash has learned means ‘dinner’, and bustles away. Mr. Okumura nods at Ash again, then excuses himself. 

Eiji doesn’t take Ash to the guest bedroom. He takes Ash upstairs. The kid sister is spying through her doorway, but she peeps and shuts her door. Eiji doesn’t say anything about that; he takes Ash to his room. They sit on the edge of his bed together. “Sorry,” Ash says suddenly. 

“It’s okay,” says Eiji. 

Eiji’s room is tidy, almost crisp, and he looks good here. It looks good for him to be here. There are trophies from sporting events and a few posters. And a calendar, now out of date, low on the list of priorities while Eiji reacclimates to his life. He looks good here, and Ash is keenly aware of the difference between this and the various crappy rat’s nests he stashed Eiji in for alleged safekeeping. When Ash takes his eyes away from the calendar—he can hardly stop staring at the ‘NY’ penned in on the date of Eiji’s departure—but when he does, he looks at Eiji. Eiji looks at him. “Sorry,” Ash says. 

“It’s okay,” says Eiji. 

Ash had expected that by now they’d be fighting about where he had gone and what he was doing. Eiji was furious when he opened the door, and he’s unhappy now. He hadn’t pushed Ash, but Ash is waiting for the rest of it, for worse. Eiji might ask, “Who were you with?” He might ask, “You didn’t hurt anyone, did you?” And Ash would say cruelly, “Well that’s the easy guess, isn’t it?” And they’d fight. 

Eiji doesn’t ask any of those things, and Ash is an asshole for thinking about it. He bows his head before Eiji and exhales slowly. “Sorry,” he says.

It’s like the wind in the wheat. It’s like the seasons. Eiji puts his hand into Ash’s hair, and it’s like the best part of every season and none of the worst. “Please don’t do it again,” he says. It’s like the wind in the wheat—his touch is—and Ash understands how his body can overcome the air to fly. “Please, please don’t again.” He moves his thumb along Ash’s hairline, and tucks some hair behind his ear. 

“Sorry,” Ash says. 

“I thought, of course I thought, that somebody came to take you away—to America, to anywhere—I thought that…”

“Sorry,” Ash says. Eiji ruffles the top of his hair. 

“But even more, I thought it wasn’t enough—that nobody came but you went away—that you took yourself. That you realized it wasn’t enough to be here, and New York felt too near to you—” Ash is wincing beneath Eiji’s hand. “—and you are tired, and I thought you went to go—to do—to go where I could not.”

‘Yeah, I’m tired,’ Ash thinks. And then: ‘You thought I was a cat, crawling beneath a porch, to die.’ And then: ‘Sorry.’ Eiji wasn’t wrong to worry, and some part of Ash—the cat toward the porch—resents that he always knows what to worry about. It would otherwise be easier to crawl away. Eiji makes it so hard, and Ash is uncharitable in thinking about that while he lifts his chin just so, lifting his eyes to look at Eiji’s face. Eiji is running his fingers through Ash’s hair, and his eyes are closed, and his lips are parted only enough for Ash to glimpse his tongue filling his mouth. He’s at rest. He isn’t about to say anything, neither in prayer nor in anger… He’s at rest. Ash watches him and he watches the quiet of his mouth. He wonders how long they have before either of them need to move. Eiji touches the back of his neck, and when he breathes in, there’s a wet glisten to his mouth, a glitter, like finding a nickel in the street, like better luck than Ash has ever had. 

\--

After they talk about it, Eiji breaks the news at dinner; best to get it done straightaway. Ash thinks his family will be pleased with it, but Eiji rolls his eyes. “You are breaking some hearts tonight, Ash,” he says, before they go downstairs. “I can say it for sure.” Weirdly, he’s right. Eiji tells them that Ash has gone out today and rented an apartment—Ash isn’t sure exactly how he says it, what phrasings he uses and what implications they carry—he says it delicately, but like he’s trying not to sound delicate. Ash knows that quality in him, and his family surely must know it too. But he’s earnest in his habits, in himself, so he says it just that way, and the parents and the kid sister cycle through their reactions. Mr. Okumura drinks shortly from his glass. Mrs. Okumura says something she says often, a few rolling vowels whose disheartened meaning Ash can get the gist of. Kid sister cries out, “Ash!” That’s most of what she says to him, his name at varying heights, since she’s shy about her English. Ash looks at all their faces, and then he looks at Eiji—throw me a rope, give me a line, lend me a hand—and he spends so much time looking at Eiji that Eiji elbows him hard. Mrs. Okumura chides him for that with a motherly lilt— _Eiji!_ —but Ash looks at the three of them again.  
First, he thanks them in their language. Then he says, in his own, “You have a beautiful home.” Eiji translates it for his parents, and Ash falters, still lacking a line, still needing a hand. “Your home is beautiful,” he says. 

Eiji looks at him strangely, but the translates all the same. His mother speaks, and he tells Ash what she does: “You are welcome anytime.”

\--

After Ash moves into his own apartment, Eiji takes him grocery shopping. They go on Thursdays for the best sales. The first time they bicker on a shopping trip, it feels impossibly normal, and Ash is so relieved that he almost starts to cry. Eiji sees it in him and stops short. “Ash! Are you—You know I didn’t—”

“Oh, come on,” Ash says, rolling his wet eyes. “It’s not that. That was the lamest thing you ever said to me.”

Eiji looks up at him, his brow pinched, helpless in the way Ash loves and fears and fears for. “Then why?” But Ash cuffs his shoulder with a loose fist and saunters toward the milk. 

\--

Another time, in the market, Ash passes a gaggle of housewives, and they’re so small. He looks over their heads. He turns his face, and looks over the heads of an elderly couple and then some twentysomethings. Then he looks to Eiji. 

“Why are you making that face?” Eiji asks. “Horrible. If you make that face when you’re buying produce, people will think you’re finding rotten fruit. Customers will run away and the store staff will ask you if you’ll please leave because of it.”

Ash considers this, tilting his head from side to side as if weighing Eiji’s words. “Unfunny,” he decides, and Eiji grins at him. “I stand out here like crazy.”

Eiji considers it in the same way Ash did, and Ash wonders suddenly if he picked up the habit from Eiji, or if Eiji picked it up from him. Something in him squirms uncomfortably at the thought, and he tries to wish away his own influence. “You do,” Eiji says finally. “You’re tall and fair. Taller than most people here, and fairer than anyone here. And you look a little lost but you are not a tourist, so it’s interesting and makes anybody feel curious. And also, people like to look at beautiful people.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“No smartassery.” That word must have come from Max, which fills Ash equally with annoyance and longing. Eiji pushes the shopping basket into Ash’s hands. “Would you take this? I am always the one digging through vegetables anyway. Ash, people just like to look at you. It’s all right.”

“Creepy and weird,” Ash says. He tries to talk like the feeling he got on the way into California: dry heat, a breeze that might as well be dead air. The hard earth and the dust despite it. The lack of cultivation. But Eiji touches his elbow.

“It’s all right.”

\--

Eiji doesn’t come over to this apartment to clean it, but he ends up cleaning it anyway. “I was going to,” Ash says irritably, but he’s reclining stubbornly on his couch, so haughty about it that it doesn’t look relaxing. Eiji ribs him only a little bit while he shuffles laundry into a hamper and puts paper plates into the trash. After it’s tidier, Eiji goes to stand in front of the couch. He waits for Ash to sit up so Eiji has room to sit as well, and Ash doesn’t. Ash wants it to be a stand-off. His chin is tucked low and his eyes are settled low, too, as if he doesn’t care about this or much of anything. When they’re low like this, the green in them feels like a pond. Like summertime, and the green moss at the bottom of a pond. Like the desire you might feel when looking at it, in summertime, in the thick heat of afternoon. You could envy how cool and still it is, and you could wish for a mouthful to help put you at ease. Ash is the sort of summer that leaves one wishing for reprieve. And his eyelashes flicker every time he moves his eyes, and the corner of his mouth is soft in his sullen attempt at a frown. He cares about this and loads of other things. He doesn’t put up a fight when Eiji touches his ankles, lifts them up, and sits at the end of the couch. Eiji lets Ash’s calves rest across his lap. He has to resist the urge to lay his hands against them.

“Ibe-san called me to say hi,” Eiji says. “And he asked about you. He wanted to know how you’re doing.”

“Yeah? What’d you tell him?”

“I told him he owes me 1,000 yen, because you haven’t learned kana yet and so my side of the bet was right.”

“God, Eiji, your faith in me is just…”

Eiji laughs. He worries his fingers together, the fingers of just one hand, while he wonders what Ash would do if Eiji reached for him. For his hand, his face, his hair, what… Eiji just wants to reach. “It’s not that. You are smart, very bookish, I already know. But you are thinking about lots of things, so learning to read is not as important.”

“Learning to read is pretty important.”

“But not as important,” Eiji says. Ash cracks open one eye, then shuts it again. He doesn’t say anything. He’s sulking. His arms are folded over his chest, and he settles more snugly against the couch cushions, because he’s sulking. Eiji only purses his lips, then puckers them, because Ash can’t see it, so he won’t get the satisfaction out of it. While he has the unseen chance, he rolls his eyes as well. The seconds keep going, and Eiji still has time, so then he sticks out his tongue for good measure. Nothing happens. It totally falls flat. Fine. He sighs. “Would you come here?”

Ash’s brow twitches. “I’m right here.”

“I mean come here.” Eiji pats his own thigh firmly, like beckoning a stubborn child. “Right here.”

“I am.” Brow, furrowing. Ash is frowning. He knows what Eiji means, but he’s not saying no. He wants to stalemate again. Eiji lets him, and the moment deflates, and Ash sighs, all put upon, before pulling himself to sit up. His eyes, the pond, relentless summertime—they’re tired while he looks at Eiji. He’s too worn out, today, to be very angry. He shifts on the couch, braces a hand against its cushion, and barely holds himself upright. He’s leaning in close, tilted low, his face angled toward Eiji’s. He blinks, relentless summertime, bleary like a muggy evening. They watch each other. It’s warm. It’s quiet. It’s humid. Relentless summertime. Then Ash dips lower, and lays his head on Eiji’s lap. Eiji touches his hair. He touches Ash’s hairline, and each temple. He smooths back the wave of it, though it falls back into place. He touches behind one of Ash’s ears, and then strokes the back of his head. It takes a little bit of this, but at last, Ash sighs, and it gives Eiji permission to touch the nape of Ash’s neck, and the side of it. Ash’s hand is curled over Eiji’s knee, a splay with the determination of ivy and its inevitable growth. He watches the ridge of his own knuckles, and his thumb shifts a little, and his index finger shifts a little, although his touch is nothing like Eiji’s. Not so smooth and good. But Ash swallows. He breathes quietly. He is allotted the safety to rest here. 

Eiji laughs. 

“What?” Ash asks, ready to gripe because he’s comfortable and he doesn’t feel like being teased. He rolls over halfway, enough to peer up at Eiji’s laughing face. 

Gracelessly, Eiji laughs again, against the back of his wrist. His other hand combs some hair away from the side of Ash’s face. “This is so stupid. I miss you.” Ash grimaces at him, which makes him laugh another time. “I know, I know. Um, it’s because, before—I was with you all the time, right? And when I wasn’t, it was because I couldn’t be. It wasn’t like I would stop by to see you once in a while. Just to check in with you and to say hello and to say, ‘I’ll see you later.’ I was with you, or I wanted to be. Nothing between it.”

Nothing between it. Nothing between them, he might mean, except for circumstance. Between them now is a matter of minutes; of schedules and separate lives; of choice. This is the most choice Ash has ever had for himself, isn’t it, and these must be strange things he’s choosing. Ash squints at Eiji like he’s suspicious, which makes Eiji laugh all over again. Then he rolls back over to face forward. He’s still holding onto Eiji’s knee. “How come that’s funny?”

The wind in the wheat. The best part of every season. If Ash is relentless, Eiji is the steadfast thing any man’s heart needs to keep beating. He touches the crest of Ash’s cheek like he’s dared himself to do it, before returning to Ash’s hair. “Because it’s stupid, I said. I could be with you all the time, but I’m only with you for a little while.” 

Ash shuts his eyes. He doesn’t say anything about that, whether it’s stupid or funny or true. He doesn’t fall asleep, but they both pretend he does, until it’s evening. 

\--

Satoru Okumura spends less time hiding from him, now, and more time trying to get his attention. She hid from him not out of fear, but out of wonder, and Ash could see that in her, and he didn’t want to indulge it. But she has swallowed much of it, and she doesn’t hide so much. Twice, now, she has asked her brother to take her grocery shopping along with Ash. So, those Thursdays, they’ve waited to go until school is let out, and Eiji brings Satoru to pick up Ash. Satoru has marveled at everything. 

She shouldn’t have been so shy about her English. It’s not much worse than Eiji’s, and she’s learning as she goes. This second time they shop together, she and Eiji are whisper-fighting, and she’s getting redder in the face because she’s angry. She whisper-fights in Japanese, and Eiji responds in English, so only half of all this is a secret from Ash. It’s pissing her off. At last, Eiji says, “Just ask him,” and Satoru lets off a noise like a boiling kettle. She is so angry. 

But she spins on her heel to face Ash, who’s holding an apple in each hand. He’d been going to put them into the basket before the Okumura siblings started arguing. “Ash!” she says fiercely. “Please, will you go to the park with me on Saturday afternoon?”

“Yeah, sure,” Ash says. Satoru reels back, and then glares and gapes at the same time, wrestling with his response. So she didn’t expect it to be that easy. Ash glances at Eiji, pursing his lips, and sets the apples in the basket. 

“All right!” Satoru says. “Yes! Yes!” and Eiji pulls on her ponytail and tells her to chill out. They finish shopping, and they put everything away in Ash’s apartment, and Eiji takes his kid sister home. He brings her back on Saturday afternoon. 

“I’m just going to stay here, and Ash, I’m going to clean up a bit,” he says. “So take your time, but not too much, you know?”

“You got it, onii-chan,” Ash says, and Satoru swivels her head to look at him, and then at her brother, and then she laughs hard. She’s still laughing while she leaves with Ash. She laughs like Eiji does, and like her mother does, which makes sense—Ash thinks he would have laughed like Griffin, if they’d had more time to laugh together. Griffin’s laugh was comfortable and it would have felt good to do. But Satoru seems less like the whole of the seasons than Eiji does—and then Ash feels unfair for thinking that, for pitting a kid against her older brother. ‘I didn’t mean it that way,’ he thinks, like an apology, although she’s none the wiser. She’s talking about the neighborhood while she walks. This and that, local things, lots of stuff she thinks make sense to Ash. She has no idea what America is like. It’s sweet. He buys her a sticky bun she swears is a dessert, when she crows with delight at a shop they pass. She walks him through making the order in Japanese, and puffs out her chest with pride when he does it more or less successfully. Then they’re quiet for a while as they walk, as she eats, as they find a bench. 

Ash sits pretty still. Satoru fidgets around, first grinding the toe of her shoe against the ground, then wiggling in place as if to the tune of a song. She’s going to ask him something—it’s just a matter of when she asks it. Well, Ash isn’t going to encourage it. She’ll need to work up the nerve herself, if she wants to know. 

She does. “Are you okay?” she blurts. 

Ash turns his face to look at her, makes sure she can see him blink, and how calmly he does it. “Yeah,” he says. 

Satoru nods. “He said you’d say so. Nii-chan, of course.”

“Of course.”

She nods again. She looks at her knees, kicks both of her feet a couple times, and sighs shortly. “Is he okay?”

He’s calm again when he blinks. He makes sure that he is. He wants her to see how calm he is, how honest he is, how calm and honest he can look when he needs to. “Yeah,” he says. “He’s okay. I asked him, too. We sat down and talked and I asked him, and he says he’s doing all right.”

“And it’s true? You believe it when he tells you, right?”

“Yeah.”

She nods again, and sniffs a bit, not for crying. It’s a restless energy. Then she raises her face to look at Ash with her mouth open, taking in a breath. She purses her lips. She opens her mouth again. She purses her lips… “Will you tell me what happened to him? Nobody will. Our family won’t tell me all of it.”

God, she’s a lot like Eiji in the quality of their eyes. “No,” says Ash, “I’d better not.” Before she can protest, he tells her, “If I do, you’ll be angry with me.”

She looks down, then back up. “I do not want to be angry with you.”

Ash grins at her, and she blushes at it, surprised. “Then I won’t tell you.”

\--

“I’m all right,” Eiji says, like Ash is weird for asking. “Why?”

“Why,” Ash repeats. He raises his eyebrows, and then he squints instead. “Jesus Christ, Eiji, I don’t know. Let’s see.”

But Eiji is making an irritated noise, not content with only rolling his eyes. “Oh, you are so dramatic. I’m already home, yeah? I am home with my family doing many things I am supposed to do—Ibe-san is helping—we are here, we are home, and it has been so quiet. I forgot what quiet was like because New York was so loud, you know, with everything, but now it’s quiet. Yes, Ash, I feel fine. I feel good.”

The space between them is thin like flimsy ice, too great with the potential to splinter. Then it does splinter. “Won’t you please excuse my sorry ass,” Ash says, “for puzzling over your health.” The splinters are unimpressive things, shaming the splendor of winter.

Eiji sits with Ash on the couch, and bumps their shoulders together even when Ash turns his face away. “I’m grateful to you,” he says, “and to your ass.” Ash pantomimes gagging, and Eiji graciously ignores it. “It’s because I prayed.” He waits for Ash to look at him, and when Ash does, Eiji asks him, with his eyes, to hold this gaze they’ve got. “When you were stabbed in New York, and you were dying, I prayed so much. I never prayed so much in my whole life, Ash. Ahh, you know, every time I prayed for you, I thought that. And every time, it was true. But I haven’t prayed that much since I waited for you to be okay that last time.”

“You prayed for me to stay alive, I guess,” murmurs Ash, just a little sullen. He’s holding the gaze. 

“Of course I prayed for that. Dumb Ash. And I prayed for it and said to God that if you stayed alive, I would be okay. It was the only thing I needed. I said, ‘God, it’s all okay if he just stays alive. I will make sure this stops. God, save him one more time and then give him to me, please, okay, God? Then we will leave this place and we won’t worry you anymore.’ Oh, I was praying to the god of New York, by the way.”

It’s humid. Relentless summer. Eiji asked for the held gaze but it feels unfair to be stared at by Ash. Nobody stands a chance against it. “There’s a god of New York?” Ash asks. 

“Probably. I bet yes. Don’t you think?”

“No.”

But Ash is just being difficult—he’s actually a little curious about it, is thinking on the idea. Eiji knows the thoughtful hue of his eyes, and he’s immersed in it right now, so there’s no missing it. “But do you understand?” he asks. 

Ash laughs, quiet and remote. “I’m never going to understand,” he says. Eiji opens up his arms, and Ash settles into them. 

\--

“Just send all of them,” Ibe-san said, and Eiji replied that he refused to do that. There would be too many awful ones, too many taken with a shaky hand, an underwhelming eye. Eiji saw what he looked like in Ibe-san’s photographs, and he was amazed that he could be seen that way. He was amazed at what Ibe-san could see. Meaning, he can’t send crappy pictures. 

He’s going through this latest roll of film. A couple of his sister, but only because she wasn’t paying attention or posturing for the camera. She’s leaning over the railing of a bridge, standing on her toes, her mouth shaped into wonder. He’ll send Ibe-san one of these. There are pictures of blossoms and birds, buildings here and there. The bulk of the film is of Ash. And the last series of pictures he took, an impromptu photo shoot, is in Ash’s apartment. Ash is watering some potted plants; Ash is leaning out on the tiny balcony, smoking, drinking a soda, pushing back his hair; Ash is beautiful, and alive, and everything he does looks like a holy moment on film. A picture, here, while he buckles his belt, which Eiji doesn’t think he can send to Ibe-san. A picture, here, of Ash with his cheek in his hand, asking Eiji a question. His mouth is bright like a bell at a temple. Eiji doesn’t think he can send this one, either. The last picture he remembers taking that day, before his film ran out: Ash, reclining, his face turned to the left, the heel of his palm against his forehead. He’s flipping off the camera. Eiji laughs. 

But there are more pictures after that. Eiji had set down his camera, and when he went home he saw he needed to change out the film. Now he sees why. Himself, from the back, fetching a glass from Ash’s cupboard. Himself, taking a swallow of water. He sees the jut of his own Adam’s apple with startling clarity. And himself, stretching his arms above his head, elbows bent, a straining sort of pleasure to the shape of him. He’s embarrassed to see himself this way, but he’s not blushing until he imagines Ash’s hands around his camera, Ash’s green eye deciding on the frame. He wonders if Ash was laughing at him, or whether Ash was biting at his lip, or whether he was saying what Eiji thinks now—that Eiji looks pretty good, that way, in Ash’s apartment. 

Ash is relentless.


End file.
